Congress failed as Opposition, disconnected with people: Modi

Noida, Jan 6: A fire broke out at the ESIC Hospital in Noida on Thursday morning and firefighting was underway, officials said.

The blaze broke out in the basement of the seven-storey hospital building located in Sector 24, a police official said.

Fire tenders were rushed to the spot after the Fire Department was alerted about it around 8 am, the official said.

After that, a search was done to see if anyone was trapped in the building, he said.

The cooling process is now underway.

He said the fire had engulfed the ground, first and second floors of the building, except the basement.

Police said they received information about fire at Kaveri printing press at 2:45 am, when the manager Yogesh called them. The press owners have been identified as Atul and Anuj Goyal, residents of Sukhdev Vihar, they said.

The man who died in the fire has been identified as Phool Dev, from Bihar, who used to work as a help there. Dev went inside the building in the night to sleep before the fire started and died due to suffocation, the fire department official said.

The body has been kept at Lal Bahadur Shastri Hospital and the post-mortem will be done once the family reaches here, police said.

New Delhi, Jun 18: Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday removed Sanjay Jha as a party spokesperson, days after he wrote a newspaper article criticising the party. She also approved the appointment of Abhishek Dutt and Sadhna Bharti as national media panelists for the Congress.

"Congress president has also approved that Sanjay Jha be dropped as AICC spokesperson with immediate effect," the party said in an official statement.

In the article published a few days ago, Mr Jha had said, "The Congress has demonstrated extraordinary lassitude, and its lackadaisical attitude towards its own political obsolescence is baffling..."

"I would like to call a spade a spade here and a shovel: there has been no serious effort to get the party up and running with any sense of urgency," he had said in the article in a national newspaper.

"There are many in the party who cannot comprehend this perceptible listlessness. For someone like me, for instance, permanently wedded to Gandhian philosophy and Nehruvian outlook that defines the Congress, it is dismaying to see its painful disintegration," he had said.

New Delhi, May 27: The government has further extended the deadline for bidding to buy its entire 52.98 per cent stake in the country's second-biggest oil refiner, Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL), by over one-and-a-half months to July 31.

This is the second extension for submission of expression of interest (EoI) for BPCL stake by interested bidders. The government had first invited bids showing interest in buying its stake, by May 2. It was then extended till June 13.

This has now been extended to 5 p.m. on July 31 in "view of further requests received from the interested bidders and the prevailing situation arising out of COVID-19", an official notice put up by disinvestment department DIPAM late on Tuesday said.

Accordingly, the last date for submission of written queries or preliminary information memorandum has been pushed back to June 23 from the earlier deadline of May 16.

The disinvestment in BPCL involves the government selling its entire 52.98 per cent stake in the company to a strategic investor with transfer of management control. The government has barred PSUs from bidding for BPCL and expects private sector Indian players and global MNCs to bid for its stake. The government's stake in BPCL is worth around Rs 50,000 crore.